EC Comics! It's An Entertaining Comic! The Final Issue!

The EC Reign Month by Month 1950-1956
The Final Issue: The Picto-Fiction Titles
The Third (and Fourth) Issues + The Wrap-Up

Rudy Nappi

Shock Illustrated 3 (May 1956)

"Curiosity Killed"★★★
Story by Al Feldstein
Art by Reed Crandall
(from Tales from the Crypt #36)

"The Demon"★★1/2
Story by John Larner
Art by Graham Ingels

"Sin Doll"★★★
Story by Daniel Keyes
Art by Jack Kamen

"One Man's Meat"★★★1/2
Story by Jack Oleck
Art by George Evans

"Curiosity Killed"

Henrietta Clayton suspects her neighbor Wallace murdered his wife Emily and begins to watch his movements closely. She observes that he comes home every day with a shoebox and figures out that he is carrying out an elaborate scheme, cutting his wife's body into pieces small enough to fit in a can carried away by a pigeon, then emptying the contents of the can so it can be eaten by dogs. When she explains this to her husband, he reveals that he plans to do the same to her.

One of Feldstein's loonier ideas, "Curiosity Killed" originally appeared in shorter form in Tales From the Crypt. It's still fun, though a bit drawn out, and I think I'd enjoy anything drawn by Reed Crandall.

There's been a murder in the wax museum! A madman named Ellis cut the throat of another victim right in front of a wax figure of himself and escaped unseen! The police are nervous and, when a reporter named Hardy mocks them, they challenge him to demonstrate his courage by spending a night in the waxworks alone. He agrees and the night is a horror, since the wax dummy of Ellis comes to life and holds a knife to Hardy's throat. In the morning, the police find him dead of fright, with nary a mark on him; Ellis had been caught the evening before, uptown.

"The Demon"

An uncredited adaptation of A.M. Burrage's classic 1931 story, "The Waxworks," "The Demon" adds a nonsensical murder at the beginning before getting down to business. Ingels does a decent job with the illustrations but there's little new here, and I wonder why they didn't credit the source. Didn't they learn their lesson after Ray Bradbury caught them?

Laura awakens after another night spent with a strange man and sobs to her rag doll, Lorelei. She receives an unexpected visit from her former beau, Fred, who is distraught at having been dumped. He shoots her and then himself, but his suicidal aim is better than his homicidal one, and she is barely injured. Laura has a breakdown but is quickly cured by a stay in a hospital; when she gets out, she picks up a sailor and beds him. Disgusted with her own behavior, she begins psychoanalysis and discovers that her disorder stems from a reaction to her emotionally abusive father. Now that the mental floodgates are open, the former "Sin Doll" looks forward to a cure.

"Sin Doll"

One of the better psychology stories I've read in the EC line, this tells an extended tale over the course of 20 pages. Kamen's art is at its best, for the most part, and the problems Laura encounters and their causes fit together logically.

Paul is a milquetoast whose wife, Myra, treats him with scorn. He finds out that she's cheating on him with a man named Marsh, but when he begs her to give up her lover she is unmoved. Things were so much better when Paul and Myra spent their honeymoon at the lake! After Myra stays away for two weeks, she comes home and it becomes clear that Marsh has stopped returning her calls. Paul takes her back to the lake to try to recapture the old magic and makes her a nice dinner but, when she scorns him, he reveals that the meat that made up the main course was cut from her lover's body.

The ending of "One Man's Meat" took me completely by surprise! I fully expected Paul to snap and murder Myra. Instead, we get a reminder of the great, ghoulish EC style of yore, albeit without the gore. Evans's art is superb throughout.-Jack

"One Man's Meat"

Peter: "The Demon" starts off as a variation on (ohholyJesusnotthisagain) the hackneyed "night alone in a wax museum" plot, then veers a bit into a more satisfactory territory with its genuinely creepy climax. Yeah, I was ready to crow on about the fact that Ellis can hold his breath for hours at a time and that surely Inspector Clouseau is heading up the search in the wax museum when writer John Larner throws in a perfectly acceptable twist. Really nice Ingels pencils here as well.

"Sin Doll" is a sleazy (without being fun sleazy) dip into subtle nymphomania and endless psychobabble that runs on at least ten pages too long and gets us absolutely nowhere when it finishes up. By this time, my moaning and groaning about Jack Kamen's stencils is probably getting as old as I am after reading this crap, but I'll just say this and leave well enough alone: I thought for sure this story was going down a different alley when Laura saw Fred (the guy who had recently eaten his gun) in a sailor's suit on the bus. Of course, that was a misunderstanding on my part due to the fact that all of Kamen's characters look exactly alike!

"One Man's Meat" (oh, is that title a double entendre or what?) is the kind of story EC historians should stumble over themselves to call "groundbreaking" or "daring" or "hell razing," but that I would call "tawdry" or "cheap" or (once again) "sleazy." It might be historic if Jack Oleck had told it like it is, daring to address the issue without masking it in an apron or an aversion to dusting ("Not that Paul was that type"). It's a wonder we don't see our poor, put-upon protagonist dancing in his living room, clad only in Myra's panties and a feather boa, singing show tunes. If Paul is such a dandy, how the heck did he get the upper hand on Marsh? Oh, and if Jack didn't mention it already, that final panel is a rip-off of Roald Dahl's "Lamb to the Slaughter."

Reed Crandall

Crime Illustrated 3 
(Cover-dated June 1956 but never released)

"Deadline" ★★★
Story by Al Feldstein
Art by Reed Crandall
(From Shock SuspenStories #12)

"Repeat Performance" ★★
Story by Jack Oleck
Art by Wally Wood

"Wanted for Murder" ★★★ 1/2
Story by John Larner
Art by Al Williamson

"Booby Trap"  ★1/2
Story by Al Feldstein
Art by Charles Sultan

"Out of My Mind" ★ 1/2
Story by Al Feldstein
Art by Jack Kamen
(From Crime SuspenStories #6)

"Deadline"

Lawrence Greig was a fine reporter till he began to hit the bottle hard. Now he's just a drunk, begging the managing editor of the Morning Globe for a break. Greig is in love with a beauty named Annie and needs cash to keep seeing her, so the editor tells him he can have his job back if he digs up a front page story. Wandering the streets, he enters a greasy spoon and happens upon a murder--the owner of the place just killed his wife in the back room and tells Greig that she was a tramp. The reporter calls in his story but hears the woman let out a moan. He bashes her skull in so as not to lose his big story but is horrified to see that the woman he just killed is his beloved Annie!

"Plain" Margaret in
"Repeat Performance"

"Deadline" may have a predictable finish, but Reed Crandall's art is suitable for a pulp or a 1950s' paperback cover. His shading is especially nice, evoking the despair of the drunken reporter whose last chance goes horribly wrong. This is a far cry from the art of Jack Kamen in the original comic book story.

Handsome George and his plain wife Margaret rent a great apartment at a low price and don't mind that it was the scene of a murder three months before, when David King poisoned his wife, Ruth. Soon, Margaret meets beautiful Lisa Dayton, who lives downstairs with her husband. Lisa cozies up to her new neighbor, George, and before you know it they are lovers. George confesses to Martha and gives her a bitter-tasting drink. Yet when the cops take a dead woman out of the building it isn't Martha, it's Lisa, whose husband poisoned her. He finally got tired of her philandering, since she had also been the other woman in the prior murder.

Assigning Wally Wood to draw a story like "Repeat Performance," with a main character who is described as a plain female, is doomed to failure, and this story has one bad twist after another. The final surprise--Lisa is dead, not Margaret--is poorly executed.

"Wanted for Murder"

An escaped convict named Kempner comes across a beautiful woman bathing naked in a stream and follows her to a campsite, where she joins a man. The convict attacks them and learns that they are Harry and Susan Baird, who bargain for their lives by telling Kempner that they can lead him to a fortune in an abandoned shack. The trio makes its way to the shack, where Kempner is surprised by police, who shackle him to Baird. It seems Baird and Susan are not married: Harry killed her father and they hid his money in the shack!

A taut and suspenseful story, "Wanted for Murder" benefits immensely from Al Williamson's art, especially his depiction of Susan, a real knockout.

"Booby Trap"

Insurance man Frank Bliss meets pretty Joyce Fairbanks at a party. The fact that she is married doesn't stop him from calling her the next morning to ask for a date, an invitation she accepts. Within months they are in love and, before you can say Fred MacMurray, Bliss sells Joyce's husband, Ed, a $30,000 life insurance policy. Frank plans a "Booby Trap"--a man is beaten to death and his body is sent off a cliff in his car. The killer returns to Joyce, who gloats over the success of her plan with her husband to murder Bliss; she will identify his body as that of her husband and collect the insurance money.

Little more than warmed-over Double Indemnity, this story, illustrated by newcomer Sultan, falls apart when the murder occurs and the identity of the killer has to be hidden for the last couple of pages. It's clear there's a twist ending being set up and that can mean only one thing.

Betty Jane Andrews plans to murder her rich husband, Bert. She fakes an attempt on his life to show she's "Out of My Mind," then decides she will kill him for real later that night. Betty murders Bert in his bed with a meat cleaver and pleads insanity at trial, where she is sentenced to the insane asylum run by Bert's brother, Harvey. In the asylum, Betty does a good impression of a lunatic and receives treatments that begin to be a bit much, so she confesses to Harvey that she meant to kill Bert and is perfectly sane. He admits that he knew it all along and orders more treatments for her, since she'll be there a long time.

"Out of My Mind"

What starts out as a fairly entertaining story with a female killer who is hard-boiled and straightforward about her intentions drags on too long and becomes a catalog of treatments in the crazy house. Jack Kamen's art is no more exciting here than in the comics.-Jack

Peter: I liked “Repeat Performance” and “Wanted for Murder” in both script and art department. It’s nice to get a few last glimpses at the work of Wally and Al and there are some comedic moments in “Repeat” that really shine (“George, she . . . she’s simply fascinating,” Margaret told George’s newspaper one day.). Like the best of the crime Pictos, these two stories call to mind Gold Medal crime novels. I was not so fond of “Booby Trap,” which has a climax very reminiscent of “Repeat Performance” and some lazy graphics by Charles Sultan. Roger Hill, in his detailed notes for Crime Illustrated in the Cochran box, remembers that EC fans were not at all happy with Sultan’s work, and it’s easy to see why. Sultan's style is a little too much like Joe Orlando’s and Sultan peppers his stuff with the same kind of swipes as Orlando (here he borrows Liz Taylor for some angles of Joyce). I will say that it’s fascinating that Oleck and Feldstein took advantage of the prose delivery and were able to conceal the similar switcheroos in “Booby” and “Repeat” right up to the last “panel.”

Reed Crandall

Terror Illustrated 3 
(cover dated June 1956 but never released)

"Halloween"★★★★
Story by Al Feldstein
Art by Reed Crandall
(From Shock SuspenStories # 2)

"Keepsake"★★
Story by Jack Oleck
Art by Graham Ingels

"The Mother"★★1/2
Story by John Larner
Art by Jack Davis

"Kid Stuff"★★★
Story by Al Feldstein
Art by George Evans

"The Long Wait"★★★
Story by Al Feldstein
Art by Johnny Craig
(Originally appeared as "Dead Wait" in Vault of Horror # 23)

Ann Dennis takes a job minding the children at Briarwood Orphan Asylum, which is run by the penny-pinching Mr. Critchit. She supplements what little money she gets to buy food for the children by adding her own cash and goes door to door begging for used clothing. Critchit refuses even to buy a pumpkin so the kiddies can celebrate "Halloween" and, when Ann discovers that he's being paid well and keeping most of the money, she confronts him. He begins to strangle her but the children, dressed in their costumes, intervene and use his severed head as their jack o'lantern!

"Halloween"

A classic EC story, brilliantly illustrated by Crandall. Happily, the final panel doesn't shy away from showing us the head, though the lack of color tamps down the gore.

"Keepsake"

When Miss Hetty dies, the old undertaker thinks back to how he had known and loved her since they were children. She grew up and married a salesman named John Price; when he died, only the undertaker knew that Hetty had murdered him. She grew old, lost her mind, and finally died, and when the undertaker visited her home he found that she had taken Price's corpse and slept next to it for years. The faithful undertaker will replace her corpse next to that of her husband.

No one draws old, sad folks quite like Ghastly, but "Keepsake," a rather blatant knockoff of Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," is so slow-paced that the ending is hardly a shock.

An alcoholic named Krebs leads his wife and kids to shelter of a sort in an abandoned house where rats roam free. In a rage, Krebs strikes his wife and kills her; after he walls up her body, the kids are taken away and he is left alone with the vermin. Krebs begins to think one particular rat is the reincarnation of his wife, but his efforts to kill it backfire and lead to his own demise.

"The Mother"

Jack Davis's dynamic visuals are the highlight of "The Mother," which meanders from plot point to plot point but which ends on a satisfying note.

Playing in the local cemetery, brother and sister Joey and Melissa fall through a sinkhole and discover an underground cavern, where they find a coffin that houses a vampire! Mom doesn't want them playing near dead things and Dad works a long, hard day, so the kids are basically left to their own devices. Dead pets are one thing, but when a woman is found dead then Joey takes matters in hand and fashions a stake in the shape of a cross. He and Melissa destroy the vampire and go home to the realization that Dad won't ever be coming home.

Young Peter watches The Twilight Zone

George Evans does a fine job on "Kid Stuff" and the story is well-told, even if the end lacks punch. However, if one is going to address the vampire myth, why is the coffin open and bathed in sunlight from above, and why does Dad head off to work each day? Are we supposed to take that "going to work" equals sleeping in his coffin?

Buckley has spent years enduring "The Long Wait" before snatching the opportunity to murder Duval on a remote island and steal his valuable black pearl. He orders Kulu to row him back to civilization, but the native decides to harvest a treasure of his own: the red-haired head of the white man named Buckley!

Terror Illustrated ends with a retread of a decent story that allows Johnny Craig to demonstrate yet again why he was so good at comics and illustration.-Jack

"The Long Wait"

Peter: "Keepsake" is a bit on the long side but it's effective and rather risqué (after all, necrophilia wasn't as widely accepted in the 1950s as it is today). Surely, Oleck was trying to evoke Poe with his flowery prose. "The Mother" has to be the most padded picto-fiction story we've yet encountered and the finale is over the top. "Kid Stuff" is an honest-to-goodness monster story, sadly scarce in the Pictos, but its reveal is predictable and built on a foundation of cheats and misinformation. Did mom know about dad's nighttime occupation? Without getting into salacious detail, I'd say she must have! If so, did she marry him with this peculiar character trait? If so, how did he sire two children? How could she trust a vampire in the house with her two kids? Wouldn't Joey have been afraid of asking his pop about vampires after seeing him in a coffin? Sloppy storytelling.

Rudy Nappi

Confessions Illustrated 3
(cover dated July 1956 but never released)

"High School Bride" ★★ 1/2
"Teen-Age Temptress" ★ 1/2
Stories by Daniel Keyes
Art by Jack Kamen

"Love Cheat" ★★
Story by Daniel Keyes
Art by Johnny Craig

"The Alcoholic" ★
Story by Daniel Keyes
Art by Jack Kamen

"Two Husbands" ★★
Story by Daniel Keyes
Art by Joe Orlando

"High School Bride"

Cathy Martin is head over heels in love with dreamy Lee Everett and he thinks she's pretty keen as well, so they ignore the fact that they're not even out of their teens yet and, before she knows it, Cathy is a "High School Bride"! Their parents don't see things the way the young couple do and Lee's dad forces him to remain in school and get a night job to support his new wife, so the lovebirds move in with Lee's parents to begin their holy matrimony. But marriage isn't all it's cracked up to be, Cathy finds, and Lee is a stick in the mud, working all the time. By the time he gets home, he's not in the mood for... well, you know. Cathy begins to go out on her own at night and is soon carousing with horndog Bob Lowery. At first, she resists his untoward advances but, when a woman can't get free cookies at home, she tends to shop at another store. She lets Bob take her (that way) but the shame is too much and she skips town, heading for the city and a new life.

After a short time, she begins to miss Lee and all the great times they had (revisionist history at work), so she hops a train and heads home. While she's aboard, Cathy worries what Lee might say when she tells him she's been sharing the goodies, but a dizzy spell wipes all that from her mind and, suddenly, she has more to worry about than Lee. A woman knows her own body, but a trip to the family doctor confirms her suspicions... Cathy is about to have a little Lee! Uh oh. Suddenly, Cathy realizes she might not be having a little Lee but rather a little Bob. Suddenly, her husband's reaction is a big deal again ("What would he say when I told him that I was going to have a baby... and that I didn't know if it was his... or Bob's?") but, luckily, sweet strumpet Cathy lives in a 1956 EC world, where men forgive their wives' sins and love them forever, even if the kid looks like the guy who delivers the milk, and Cathy and Lee decide to give it one more go.

"Teen-Age Temptress"

And you thought the first two issues were risqué and middle-fingers at Wertham! The outcome is a little too predictable (and lifted almost whole from "Unfaithful Wife" in the previous issue), but there's no denying that these little sleazy fables are a hoot and highly entertaining. It's always fun to see how Keyes will describe that intimate moment that inevitably befalls our female narrators (I knew that it was wrong. I knew. But it was sweet, too.). In a fascinating essay in the Russ Cochran box set of the Picto-Fictions, EC historian Roger Hill relates how Confessions Illustrated was the only one of the new PF line that was imitated by another publisher (Myron Fass's True Problems, published in June, 1956) and, after Hill's summary of that one-shot, I know I can't sleep at night until I've read it.

The unnamed narrator/protagonist of "Teen-Age Temptress" is one of Daniel Keyes's sleazier creations, a woman seemingly devoid of any morals or self-imposed stop signs. She beds her beau's pompous, bible-thumping father in order to prove he's just as salacious as she but then, after rubbing the infidelity in her boyfriend's face, she is shocked to find the old man hanging from the chandelier. Now sonny refuses to marry her. The disgraced harlot packs her bag and becomes the 34th Confessions Illustrated girl to leave town with her head hung low. I don't know enough about the author (and, in the same Picto-Fiction Cochran volume, John Benson raises doubts as to Keyes's authorship of these CI stories) to raise questions about Daniel Keyes's thoughts about 1950s' women in general, but maybe this was the kind of material he was told to write by Al Feldstein. The "Jezebel" of "Teen-Age Temptress" (and several other of Keyes's female characters) is deeply disturbed and immoral but is surrounded by moral and upstanding males. The one man who strays pays the ultimate price to "bury his dry lips in the soft hollow" of this girl's throat. She's willing to sacrifice her self-esteem just to hurt the boy she claims to love. Of all the Confessions Illustrated stories, this one is probably the nastiest.

"Love Cheat"

In "Love Cheat," Andrea has had enough of her dead-end life. Do you blame her? She's a young, gorgeous woman stuck in a 9-to-5 waitress job at the diner her husband, Tim, sunk his last penny into, far from the bright lights and gaiety she desires. So, when a Hollywood producer comes into the diner one day and sweeps her off her feet with promises of stardom, riches, and romance, Andrea slips out the back door and begins a new life. But, as so many of her CI sisters can attest, life is full of simple promises and paper dreams and, very soon, Andrea learns that something that sounds too good to be true usually unravels by page nine. Mr. Hollywood puts Andrea up in an expensive hotel but then ditches her after he gets what he wants (wink, wink) and leaves her with a boatload of bills. With no other recourse, the depressed dame takes a job as a waitress in a seedy diner (oh, the irony!) and settles in for a miserable life. An angel with extra-large wings arrives in the form of hubby, Tim, who hired private dicks to hunt Andrea down and is now on his knee, begging her to come back. Life as a waitress in your husband's Five-and-Diner ain't so bad, you know? Well, I knew it was only a matter of time before these things started settling into a pattern and lost the variety that hooked me in the first place. How many more wives who desire a better life so they leave their devoted husband and fall on hard times only to be rescued by said hubby? The Craig art is a plus and there are a few giggles here and there (as when Andrea gives up her sweeties to the producer and sighs, "How could I deny him what he wanted?"), but the writing is certainly on the wall.

"The Alcoholic"

Jill loves to make a drunken spectacle of herself at the parties she attends with panty-waist husband, Bill, but it seems that Bill has had just about enough. He accuses her of drinking to excess so she can come on to the other men at the party and Jill tells him that she only drinks because she's sick to death of his rules and regulations. Friend Dr. Cottrell suggests that both of them should be in therapy and, after a particularly lengthy scream-fest (and Jill's arrest for drunken driving), the couple agree to see a therapist. It's there that Bill makes his stunning confession: it's he who's "The Alcoholic," and he's been one for years. Y'see, his mom was an alky and his dad killed himself to escape her and ever since then Bill has hated what liquor can do to a person and yet, two-faced dork that he is, he's kept his sickness from Jill all these years and tortured her with his accusations! But the psychiatrist brings all of Bill's self-loathing and mom-hatred to the surface and it all escapes like so many bubbles from flat champagne. All that's left is the make-up kiss, fifty thousand bucks in psychiatry bills, and lawsuits from Jill's drunken accident. In so many ways, "The Alcoholic" is a stunning departure from any other story that appeared in Confessions Illustrated. For one, it's the longest (at sixteen pages) and the wordiest; two, there's no first-person narrative; and three, it's easily the most boring and insipid trash to appear in the rag, lacking anything remotely close to a new thought or interesting thread. Bill's alcoholism almost seems to be dropped in to make things spicy at the climax. Only one ludicrous scene brought a smile to my face: when Jill and Bill have a nasty argument in the kitchen, the fiery babe slaps her husband's sandwich from his hand and "the bread and meat flew in all directions." In his notes in the Cochran box, John Benson theorizes that "The Alcoholic" was not written for CI. I'd second that theory and further hypothesize that the script was actually written for Psychoanalysis and, when that title mercifully imploded, re-written with a new therapist.

"Two Husbands"

In the final story in the final issue, Ellen discovers, to her shock and amazement, that she has "Two Husbands"! How in the world did this poor girl find herself in such a pickle? I'm glad you asked. Seems that first husband, Bruce, was captured by the enemy and presumed dead in Korea. Ellen, being your typical weak woman of the 1950s, decided she couldn't raise her two kids on her own (and she needed another man for, you know, that stuff) and married one of Bruce's army buddies, Andy, who's taken good care of his new family for the last year. That is, until Ellen gets the note from the War Department, beginning with the sentence, "Er, Um, We may have been a bit presumptuous with our proclamation of Bruce's death..." So, now, with her two husbands in the room together, Ellen must make a really hard choice: Bruce or Andy? At least, CI goes out on a high note (or would have, had this issue ever seen a newsstand) with "Two Husbands," the shortest tattle-tale to appear in the zine yet, another departure. Ellen's predicament is not a result of overactive womanly wants or a desire to see the big city; Ellen sincerely thinks she's making the best choice for her two children, despite the fact that she might not even love her second husband. Joe Orlando exits EC with a highly derivative set of pencils (Ellen is clearly patterned after Elizabeth Taylor, one might say a little too derivative), a skill he'd carry over in his work the following decade over at DC. Oh, and a note on the cover report at top: that's not the cover that would have been used for #3 but one derived from another source and used in the Cochran box set. -Peter

Jack: I agree with your assessment of this issue for the most part, Peter. In "High-School Bride," we learn that a married woman is not punished for sleeping with another man. In "Teen-Age Temptress," the woman is not married, so she must be punished for sleeping with her boyfriend's father. Two Kamen stories in a row is too much Kamen. I loved the line: "the sweet roundness of me was temptingly near" her male target. Seeing Johnny Craig's art on "Love Cheat" was a welcome break from the Kamen onslaught and, once again, a married woman is forgiven for straying. It's back to Kamen in "The Alcoholic," a story I had to force myself to finish reading. It lacks the melodramatic charm of the best Confessions and is dull and preachy. "Two Husbands" is almost as dull but only half as long. It seems like these Picto-Fiction mags ran out of steam by the last issue.

Rudy Nappi

Shock Illustrated 4
(Cover dated July 1956 but never released)

"Headwork"★★
Story Uncredited
Art by Jack Kamen

"Came the Dawn"★★★★
Story by Al Feldstein
Art by Frank Frazetta
(from Shock SuspenStories #9)

"The Survivor"★★1/2
Story Uncredited
Art by George Evans

"Another Man's Poison"★★
Story by Al Feldstein
Art by Jack Kamen
(Originally appeared as "Medicine" in
Crime SuspenStories #9)

"Alter Ego"★★1/2
Story Uncredited
Art by Graham Ingels

"Headwork"

Burton hates his wife, and for good reason: she's fat, ugly, and cruel to him. Finally, he kills her and cuts her into fourteen pieces; he mails her head to the hotel by a lake where they spent their honeymoon and where he booked a return trip for them both, and he buries the other bits in the park. Just as he's about to leave on vacation, the mailman brings back the head, which Burton drops. It rolls down the front steps and the wrapping comes off, exposing his wife's severed head to the cop on the beat. Too bad she'd canceled their trip right before he killed her and the hotel mailed back his package!

Shock #4 is off to a shaky start with "Headwork," yet another variation on a story we saw just last issue! Kamen's work is back to normal, which is not a good thing, and Burton's wife is hideous.

"Comes the Dawn"

A hunter returns to his lodge to find that a beautiful, naked woman had taken refuge there, lost and wet from falling in a stream. She's Cathy Maxwell, recovering from a broken engagement. He's Bob Ames, stunned at her voluptuous beauty. "That night, Cathy was a furnace of consuming desire, and I was her stoker." In the morning, Bob hears a radio report of an escaped homicidal maniac who fits Cathy's description. He shoves her out the door and ignores her pleas to be let in; she screams and he opens the door to find her dead, murdered by the real maniac.

It's fascinating to see Frazetta's work in progress here and I almost like it better than what the finished product might have looked like, since my imagination fills in the rest.

The Survivor"

When the sole survivor of the shipwrecked Dolphin is picked up by a passing vessel, the captain wonders how she survived when the crewmen did not. Little does he know that spinster Miss Anniston and her cat Phoebe made it onto a lifeboat and then a deserted island, where one by one the men died or were killed. In the end, all that was left was the cat, which survived by snacking on its owner.

Some sharp Evans art is wasted in "The Survivor" which, at 10 pages, seems way too long. I figured out that the surprise ending would have the cat as the only one to make it; getting there was really just turning pages.

Nora Haines is consumed by jealousy because she thinks her husband, Luther, a brain surgeon, is cheating on her with his nurse. She spikes his four o'clock dose of medicine with cyanide and promptly gets in a car crash that leaves her needing--you guessed it--brain surgery. Too bad Luther's nurse remembers to give him his medicine right before he heads to the OR.

"Another Man's Poison"

Shock #4 is shaping up to be more useful for historical interest than entertainment value. "Another Man's Poison" is dull and, at twelve pages, twice as long as it needs to be. More and more, I'm beginning to see why EC Comics stories ended on page seven.

George Perry is an unimportant man who notices another man on the bus who reminds him of himself. George decides he must kill the other man, so he befriends him. George invites the man, whose name is Walter, to dinner, planning to murder him, but George gets a surprise when he reads Walter's diary and discovers that his double has identical plans for him.

Ghastly doesn't have much to do in "Alter Ego," a rather predictable little tale, and by the end I thought it was about time to close the books on EC. -Jack

"Alter Ego"

Peter: Well, this is certainly bonus coverage, dissecting a magazine that not only was never published but never even assembled! Again, for the full story, I would prod interested readers to fork over some dough for the Russ Cochran box set which goes above and beyond in its completeness, including the Frazetta art for "Came the Dawn," which only exists on art boards! As for the contents of SI #4, "Headwork" is a drab, lifeless thing with one of the dumbest climaxes to grace an EC tale ever. So, the packaging around Pearl's head managed to make a round-trip to the hotel and back but came completely unraveled when falling from Burton's hands? And the text on page four--"A storekeeper nodded. Ryan, the neighborhood policeman, waved."--describes the scene one way, but the art shows exactly the opposite, suggesting that Jack Kamen had pretty much given up by this point and was probably searching the funny book want ads for a new bullpen to haunt. "The Survivor" aims to throw the reader off the scent (When the seamen left, she began a meticulous toilet...), but it's obvious right from the get-go who the "survivor" is, and the climax comes off as supremely stupid rather than shocking. I doubt so much fuss would be paid to a cat. The only question I have is why the feline waited until Mrs. Anniston was dead to munch on corpses. At least SI goes out on a high note with "Alter Ego," a nicely told story that would fit very well in a collection of Roald Dahl tales or dramatized on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Yes, the reveal is predictable but, for me at least, the twist was secondary to the details of George's drab life and how he aimed to interrupt it for just a bit with something new.

THE WRAP

Peter: From the very beginning of this massive project, I took extensive (some would say anally-extensive) notes and rated every single one of the 1167 stories we read and commented on. Those who don't find lists or numbers interesting, feel free to skip this section. One note before the outraged start sending death threats: the percentage represents the stories given a  ★★1/2 or higher, so if a title is given a 50% rating, that means I found half of the stories at least "good." It's pretty tough to hit a homer every time at the plate (Ty Cobb ended up with a record .366 lifetime batting average, which means more than six times out of ten he didn't connect).

TITLE                                ISSUES   STORIES    ★★1/2 +    ★★★★       PERCENTAGE

Frontline Combat                  15              60               49                 5                     82%    
Piracy                                      7              28               21                 5                     75%
Valor                                       5              20               14                 1                     70%                  
Two-Fisted Tales                   24              96              62                 8                     65%
Aces High                               5              20               13                 2                     65%
Shock SuspenStories            18              72               44               10                     61%
Weird Fantasy                       22              88               53               10                     60%
WSF/Incredible SF               11              41               23                 1                     56%
Haunt of Fear                        28            111               56                 5                     50%
Mad                                       23             80                36               10                    45%
Weird Science                       22             88                40                 8                    45%
Crime SuspenStories            27            107                44                 1                    41%
Tales from the Crypt             30           120                46                 6                    38%
Vault of Horror                     29            116               29                 5                     34%
Impact                                    5              20                 5                  1                    25%
MD                                         5              20                3                   0                   15%
Panic                                    12              48                 6                  0                    13%
Extra                                      5              20                 2                  0                    10%
Psychoanalysis                      4              12                 0                  0                      0%

TOTALS                            297          1167            546                 79                    47%


Our Twenty Favorite EC Stories of All Time!

Jack

1. "Poetic Justice" (Haunt of Fear #12)
2. "Big 'If'" (Frontline Combat #5)
3. "Halloween" (Shock SuspenStories #2)
4. "A Little Stranger" (Haunt of Fear #14)
5. 'Taint the Meat ... It's the Humanity!" (Tales from the Crypt #32)
6. "Horror We? How's Bayou?" (Haunt of Fear #17)
7. "Mars is Heaven!" (Weird Science #18)
8. "Shadow!" (Mad #4)
9. "Foul Play!" (Haunt of Fear #19)
10. "Outer Sanctum!" (Mad #5)
11. "Carrion Death" (Shock SuspenStories #9)
12. "Strop! You're Killing Me!" (Tales from the Crypt #37)
13. "Whirlpool!" (Vault of Horror #32)
14. "Squeeze Play" (Shock SuspenStories #13)
15. "...And All Through the House..." (Vault of Horror #35)
16. "Shoe-Button Eyes!" (Vault of Horror #35)
17.  "Flesh Garden!" (Mad #11)
18. "Starchie!" (Mad #12)
19. "Blind Alleys" (Tales from the Crypt #46)
20. "Master Race" (Impact #1)

Jose

1. “Old Soldiers Never Die” (Two-Fisted Tales #23)
2. “Squeeze Play”
3. “A Little Stranger”
4. “Ping Pong” (Mad #6)
5. “The Handler” (Tales from the Crypt #36)
6. “Enemy Assault” (Frontline Combat #1)
7. “In Gratitude…” (Shock SuspenStories #11)
8. “Surprise Party” (Vault of Horror #37)
9. “Whupped” (Frontline Combat #14)
10. “The People’s Choice” (Weird Science #16)
11. “A Kind of Justice” (Shock SuspenStories #16)
12. “Gasoline Valley” (Mad #15)
13. “Wolf Bait” (Haunt of Fear #13)
14. “Judgment Day” (Weird Fantasy #18)
15. “…so shall ye reap” (Shock SuspenStories #10)
16. “The Aliens” (Weird Fantasy #17)
17. “Mopping Up” (Frontline Combat #7)
18. “Which Witch’s Which” (Vault of Horror #36)
19. “Star Light, Star Bright” (Vault of Horror #34)
20. “A Rottin’ Trick” (Tales from the Crypt #29)

Peter

1. "Master Race"
2. "The People's Choice" (Weird Science #16)
3.  "Poetic Justice"
4.   "The Patriots" (Shock SuspenStories #2)
5.  "Starchie"
6.  "Home to Stay" (Weird Fantasy #13)
7.   "Wolf Bait" (Haunt of Fear #13)
8.   "More Blessed to Give" (Crime SuspenStories #24)
9. "In the Bag" (Shock SuspenStories #18)
10. "The Aliens" (Weird Fantasy #17)
11.  "Squeeze Play"
12.  "Wish You Were Here" (Haunt of Fear #22)
13.  "The Million Year Picnic" (Weird Fantasy #21)
14. "...And All Through the House..."
15. "Carrion Death"
16. "Pipe Dream" (Vault of Horror #36)
17.  "Prairie Schooner" (Tales from the Crypt #40)
18. "The Radioactive Child" (Weird Science #15)
19.  "There Shall Come Soft Rains" (Weird Fantasy #17)
20.  "Jivaro Death!" (Two-Fisted Tales #19)

Next Week...
Will love come to the Losers?

And, Finally!
In Two Weeks...
A New Era Begins!

EC Comics! It's An Entertaining Comic! Issue 74

The EC Reign Month by Month 1950-1956
The Picto-Fiction Titles
February 1956 to May 1956
The Second Issues

Rudy Nappi

Shock Illustrated 2 (February 1956)

"The Lipstick Killer"★★
Story by Daniel Keyes
Art by Reed Crandall

"My Brother's Keeper"★★1/2
Story by Jack Oleck
Art by George Evans

"A Question of Time"★★★
Story by Al Feldstein
Art by Al Williamson and Angelo Torres
(from Crime SuspenStories #13)

"Dead Right"★★★
Story by Al Feldstein
Art by Graham Ingels
(from Tales from the Crypt #37)

Seventeen-year-old Lennie didn't mean to stab and kill her, but she shouldn't have surprised him as he rifled through her bedroom drawers! Its the third girl in three months, but this time the cops catch him and he is tried and sentenced to life in the state pen. During his second week in stir, "The Lipstick Killer" meets the prison psychiatrist, Dr. Mason (not The Psychiatrist, who has disappeared), who begins psychoanalysis. Talk therapy leads to the revelation that, when Lennie was four, he killed his baby sister and his parents gave him up for adoption. He has spent his young life seeking the mother he lost, but the breakthrough causes a psychotic break and Lennie is fitted for a straight-jacket.

"The Lipstick Killer"

That great cover painting by Rudy Nappi shows the opening of this story and looks like it would not be out of place on a contemporary issue of Manhunt, suggesting that Bill Gaines was trying to attract the male readers of crime and mystery digests. The story is drawn by Reed Crandall, but he doesn't have much room to stretch since it's mostly talking heads. At 18 pages long, it just goes on and on, but there's hope--in a note on the inside cover, the editors promise that this will be the last psychological story we'll be subjected to.

The kids like to make fun of Dave's slow, clumsy brother, Larry, and the town elders fear that violence will erupt, so they suggest an institution. Dave hates the idea of Larry being locked up, so he murders and buries his own brother, thinking this will free the lumbering man. What Dave did not realize is that the violence the townsfolk feared came from him, as "My Brother's Keeper" and, in the end, he is the one who is locked up.

An EC variation on Of Mice and Men, right down to Dave/George and Larry/Lennie, but with a silly surprise tacked on at the end. George Evans does his best, but the story is weak and derivative.

"My Brother's Keeper"

"A Question of Time" and "Dead Right" feature more quality art by Williamson/Torres and Ingels but add nothing new to the original comic book stories on which they are based. There is a letters column that features missives both for and against Shock #1, making me wonder how many (if any) of the letters were real and how many were fabricated. The second issue of Shock improves on the first by not having four deadly psychology stories, but one overly long shrink tale, one Steinbeck ripoff, and two re-dos of old stories do not a very good magazine make.-Jack

Peter: "The Lipstick Killer" probably came off as daring and insightful when it was published back in 1955 but, to me, it only comes off as bloated and dated in 2019. Surely, that's because of all the Hollywood flicks and episodes of Medical Center I've endured where the pansy-boy who loved mommy's panties turns to a life of sexual violence when he comes of age. But it might also be due to the hammy nature of the prose. "My Brother's Keeper" does a good job of walking the line between heart-rending and maudlin until it gets to its murky climax (and its shameful swipes of Of Mice and Men). Maybe I'm dense, but I can't figure out whether the reveal is supposed to imply that there really was no Larry or if the townsfolk thought Dave was the dangerous one all along. I'll leave that explanation to the college-educated of the bare-bones duo.

Jack: No problem, Pete, I've got you covered. Larry was real.

Reed Crandall

Crime Illustrated 2 (April 1956)

"Motive"★★1/2
Story by Jack Oleck
Art by Reed Crandall

"Fair Trade"★★★
Story by John Larner
Art by Graham Ingels

"Clean Sweep"★★1/2
Story by Al Feldstein
Art by Joe Orlando

"Screenplay for Murder"★★1/2
Story by Al Feldstein
Art by Jack Davis
(Originally appeared as "Cut"
in Crime SuspenStories #9)

"Pieces of Hate"★★
Story by Al Feldstein
Art by Johnny Craig
(Originally appeared as "In Each and Every Package"
 in  Crime SuspenStories #22)

"Motive"

Arnold, a meek, balding man, sits in a jail cell confessing to a priest, explaining why he murdered his wife, Harriet. He was an accountant who liked to buy small treasures at an auction shop on his way home, but his wife always accused him of infidelity. Working late one night, Arnold takes a dinner break with a secretary and Harriet catches them together. Arnold decides to murder his wife and buys a large, clear glass jar filled with a colorless liquid. He brings it home and tells Harriet that it's a magic jar whose liquid will turn black when either one of them is unfaithful. One night, when Harriet is out, he puts ink in the jar. The next morning, he stares at the jar, takes a knife, and cuts his wife's throat while she sleeps. He explains to the priest that Harriet had come home and replaced the black liquid with clear water!

A disappointing twist ending finds the husband in "Motive" unexpectedly a cuckold and acting out of character, cutting his wife's throat when he finds that she has been unfaithful. Despite the fine illustrations, these stories can't overcome the limited skills of the writers.

A beautiful city girl named Cora marries a burly woodsman named Mart and moves to his cabin, soon to be followed by her no good brother, Lee. Lee needs money to set himself up back in the city, so Cora thinks of the $5000 life insurance policy (with double indemnity) that her husband has and thoughts of murder soon follow. She and Lee try to electrocute Mart but mistakenly kill his dog. She buys Mart a bright red jacket and convinces him to wear it when he goes hunting. She shoots and kills the man in the red jacket but is shocked when Mart comes home and tells her he traded his new jacket for Lee's electric razor.

"Fair Trade"

Ingels is at the top of his game in "Fair Trade," giving us a stunning Cora and a frightening last panel where her wide, staring eye is about all we see of her face.

Paul Matthews has three women in his life: his wife Sarah, middle-aged and suspicious; his secretary Edna, demure and in love with him; and his mistress Karen, a bombshell who knows about the other two but doesn't care. When his wife tells him that she's divorcing him and keeping her money, Matthews hatches a plan--he'll arrange for Sarah and Edna to be on the same plane and he'll blow it up with a time bomb! Matthews's nefarious plan seems to be going well until he discovers that Edna has left his rigged radio in his office desk and, at the appointed time, Paul and Karen are blown sky high!

"Clean Sweep"

"Clean Sweep" begins as a dull story of a man with too many women and suddenly explodes in the final panels, with Joe Orlando showing an unexpected flash of brilliance as Matthews and Karen--a dead ringer for Marilyn Monroe--experience the effects of a time bomb first hand.

"Screenplay for Murder"

Matinee idol John Hammond may be on top now, but he worries about losing his fans when his wrinkles begin to show. His stand-in, Russel Slade, is nearly his double, as makeup man Pierre Maisel points out. Slade decides he wants Hammond's life and resolves to kill the movie star. One day, Hammond is alone at his mansion when, for a lark, he decides to mow the lawn for the first time. Slade appears and shoots him in the chest but trips as he runs away and finds himself right in the path of the onrushing mower.

Ten pages fly by in "Screenplay for Murder," a straightforward story with a ridiculous ending. Jack Davis tones down his art and is a bit more serious than usual, but couldn't the guy roll out of the path of the lawnmower?

Norman is tired of his obese wife, Bertha, so he kills her with an axe, dismembers her, and buries the pieces around the back yard. He travels to New York City to meet his lover, Sally, who has had plastic surgery to resemble Bertha so she can go home and take the place of his wife. After a whirlwind tour of the Big Apple they go on a game show and win the grand prize, which is at that very moment being buried in Norman's back yard.

"Pieces of Hate"

A ludicrous plot dooms "Pieces of Hate," which had just been published in comic book form two years before. Johnny Craig's art is uncharacteristically bad, with only occasional flashes of the style we've grown accustomed to. Why redo bad stories with sub-par art when you're trying to sell a new format?-Jack

Peter: I found the stories of "Motive" and "Fair Trade" to be lacking ("Fair Trade" telegraphs its "shock" ending right from the get-go) but both excelled in the art department. Who would have guessed that Graham Ingels knew how to draw female breasts? My problem with most of these Picto-stories is that there's a whole lot of padding going on and it seems to take days to get to the point (if there is, indeed, a point). The only bright spots, to me, are when Al and Co. slip in some risqué bit (such as the implied incest in "Fair Trade" and Sarah's "sagging breasts" in "Clean Sweep.") just to remind us that this is, indeed, an adult magazine we're reading. Keeping track of all the different women in Paul Matthews's life was giving me a headache so I can't imagine what it was doing to him. There was a little too much One Life to Live-esque nonsense in this one for my tastes but I'll give an extra half-star for the sheer selfishness and evil of Paul's master plan. To blow up an entire plane full of innocents, so you can keep your dough, and not blink takes a special kind of guy.

Reed Crandall

Terror Illustrated 2 (April 1956)

"Horror in the Freak Tent" ★★★
Story by Al Feldstein
Art by Reed Crandall
(from Haunt of Fear #5)

"Requiem" ★★1/2
Story by John Larner
Art by Graham Ingels

"Mother Love" ★★1/2
Story by Al Feldstein
Art by Charles Sultan

"Head Man" ★★★
Story by Jack Oleck
Art by Jack Davis

"Reflection of Death" ★★1/2
Story by Al Feldstein
Art by George Evans
(From Tales from the Crypt #23)

Mr. Jeremy and Parks are two very hard-working grave-robbers in "Requiem," a long-winded terror tale with a few grim bits and some very nice art by Ghastly. One of the ghouls' "victims" is a ten-year-old girl, and writer John Larner certainly knows how to push a reader's buttons, as in this passage when Mr. Jeremy visits his dentist:

   Oh, my, yes, the dentist was very kind. It was common knowledge that Mr. Jeremy lived on a small pension. But Mr. Jeremy smiled and ordered the best. After all, the dentist would be paying for it himself, in a way.
   It had only been some six months since Mr. Jeremy had unearthed the body of the dentist's ten year old daughter... dead of pneumonia, poor little thing... and removed from her wasted neck her deceased mother's emerald brooch, sentimentally interred with her by her father...

If only the rest of the story were that skin-crawling, but it becomes a ponderous plod about Mr. Jeremy's impending death and his efforts to stave off Parks's inevitable pillage once Jeremy is in the ground. In his comments in the Cochran box set, John Benson quotes Ted White as saying that comic readers weren't happy about the text-laden Picto-Fiction line because "the average comic reader does not want to read..." That might not be far from the truth, since this average comic reader is having a hard time staying awake through a lot of the padded prose stories (other than the Confessions, because they cross the line into WTF?) seeing print in these titles.

"Mother Love"

Leona has known nothing but the back hand of a man all her life, first from her father and then from Clint, the man she'd been sold to. Life is cheap in the swamps. Clint purchases Leona (for the exorbitant price of twenty bucks) for obvious reasons, so when the girl gets pregnant she's useless to him. He beats her endlessly and then dumps her writhing body in front of a local hospital. There she gives birth to her child, but the doctors won't let her see the baby. In the middle of the night, she rises and goes to the maternity ward, scoops up her baby, and heads back to her shack in the swamp with vengeance on her mind. Soon after Clint has a few fatal stab wounds in him, troopers come to take Leona and her "baby" ("a misshapen pink and white horror" in a formaldehyde-filled jar) back to the hospital.

Reading just like a Gold Medal "swamp girl" novel of the mid-1950s, "Mother Love" is one huge hunk of bleakness, never letting up, especially with its grim climax. About that final image: similarities to Bradbury's "The Jar" are unavoidable but, in that story, we had no concrete idea of what was in Charlie's jar. Here, in "Mother Love," we know all too well the horror that floats in the clear liquid. This was the only chance the EC completist got to see of the work of pulp and men's magazine artist Charles Sultan (Sultan contributed one more story to the never-released Terror Illustrated #3); the artist's style is very similar to that of Joe Orlando.

"Head Man"

"Horror in the Freak Tent"

Jack Oleck contributes the best original story this issue, "Head Man," another reminder that EC had decided its readership was predominantly adult. Nine-year-old Bruce is the son of big businessman John Emery and, to escape his father's bullying ways, the boy imagines himself in other worlds while playing in his dusty attic hideaway. A rash of child murders (beheadings) has hit the town and senior Emery is demanding that the town constable, Mr. Simpson, find the murderer immediately. Since the killer has left no clues and the town hasn't the budget to hire more men, the case is cold and Simpson can only shrug. After Bruce has a frightening run-in with Simpson in the woods and another body is found, suspicion is cast on the elderly constable and he finds himself fleeing for his life from an angry mob. The raging townsfolk catch up to Simpson hiding in a barn and burn the building to the ground. Later, that night, John Emery enters Bruce's attic sanctum to find him playing with four bloody heads. Even in the glory days of baseball games played with body parts and men reduced to dog food, it's hard to imagine such an unrelentingly morose tale seeing the light of day in Vault of Horror. It's only natural to guess the true identity of the killer in one of these things after years of reading EC whodunits, but that final panel, of little Brucie holding up one of his trophies, is still a shocker. The issue is filled out with two reboots, both very nicely illustrated. -Peter

Jack-The first reboot, "Horror in the Freak Tent," features a great story and great art and may well be the single best piece of work we get in the Picto Fiction line. Reed Crandall really outdoes himself here and the setting is one of my favorites. It's too bad the final panel is rendered somewhat discreetly, as it could've been a real shocker. "Requiem" held my interest, as I wondered how it would end, but once again, the ending was somewhat muted. I agree with you about the swamp atmosphere of "Mother Love" but I found the story so distasteful from start to finish that I could not warm up to it. Sultan's splash page is excellent but the rest of the story has shaky art. I knew who the killer in "Head Man" was right from the start but, like the rest of the EC crew, Jack Davis elevates his art here. Finally, "Reflection of Death" is much too long for its slender thread of plot and drags on, wasting the talents of George Evans and giving us another example of a big reveal at the end that doesn't amount to much. Even though EC turned to the magazine format to avoid censorship, they are still censoring themselves in ways that dampen the effect of the stories.

Rudy Nappi

Confessions Illustrated 2 (May 1956)

"I Sold My Baby" ★
Story by Daniel Keyes
Art by Jack Kamen

"Unfaithful Wife" ★★1/2
Story by Daniel Keyes
Art by Reed Crandall

"They Ran Me Out of Town"  ★★★
Story by Daniel Keyes
Art by Jack Kamen

"I Destroyed My Marriage" ★★★1/2
Story by Daniel Keyes
Art by Joe Orlando

"Man-Crazy" ★★
Story by Daniel Keyes
Art by Johnny Craig

"I Sold My Baby"

Dora Edwards gets a letter from the War Department, informing her that her beau, Paul, is missing in action and presumed dead. Being seven months' pregnant, this news comes as a bit of a shock and Dora seeks answers for her future. What to do about the illegitimate bun in the oven? Poor Dora really is poor and was counting on Paul's paycheck to support them and Junior. Panicking, she contacts an old friend, who sends Dora off to a brokerage firm that handles black-market babies. The firm will put Dora up in a home for the rest of her pregnancy, give her five hundred clams, and then sell the baby outside the US to rich folk who haven't the time nor the patience for red tape. When the baby is delivered, Dora has second thoughts, but is told, too late, that the kid is already with his new parents. Imagine her surprise and consternation when she gets home and opens a letter from Paul, telling her he's fine and heading home to hug her and the little whippersnapper.
Uh oh.

Paul comes home, flips his lid when he gets the whole story, calls Dora a slut, and stomps out. A few days later, though, Paul calls his estranged fiancé and informs her that a crew of private investigators has located their baby in Montreal. Baby in arms, Paul and Dora head for the local Justice of the Peace. Lacking any of the humor and outlandishness found in the stories in issue #1, "I Sold My Baby" is the first Confessions Illustrated story to bore me to tears. The constant mood changes in the two principal characters are ludicrous; Paul's attitude towards Dora, in the climax, shifts from resentful and hating to loving and forgiving just like that.

"Unfaithful Wife"

Alice and Bill get married and settle down to a "happily ever after," but Alice learns very quickly that her husband's idea of Eden is eggs and coffee in the morning, a well-done steak in the evening, and whatever he wishes come bed time. Alice wants to travel... Bill wants to play bridge. Alice wants to dance... Bill wants to play more bridge. The daily grind (Alice has to inform the maid what to do each day!) and lack of excitement finally push our diva into the arms of another hunk. This one is Randy (a verrrrry appropriate name, we come to learn), a young writer who lives in a beach house and cavorts in the sand on his breaks, and Alice is smitten from the moment Randy coos, "Mind if I join you?"

The couple begin a hot 'n' heavy schedule of fooling around and horseback riding (in one particularly steamy scene, Alice and Randy actually combine the two activities) until Alice decides she can't take it anymore. She announces to Randy that she'll be asking Bill for a divorce, but his response is not what she'd hoped for. Randy tells her he'd love to continue their frolicking, but Alice should never fool herself; Randy will never marry a woman who would commit adultery. Our hapless heroine runs screaming from Randy's Frank Lloyd Wright knockoff, right into the arms of hubby, Bill, who'd become suspicious and followed Alice to Randy's. Bill gives Alice a stiff right cross and motors away, leaving his wife crying in the dirt. Once she gets home, the suddenly very-lonely beauty finds Bill's "Good-bye" note and launches into a session of self-pity, culminating in an inner debate between razors and sleeping pills. But Bill can't stay away for longer than three panels and he comes back to tell Alice he'd like to start again if she's willing to live the caged-up life. Alice smiles and says she wouldn't have it any other way.

Sure, Daniel Keyes has crafted a sexist, maybe even misogynistic warning for the 1950s' woman who craves more than being just a place mat and blow-up doll for the old man, but this idiocy does have certain charms and it comes complete with some stunning Reed Crandall art (yes, I know I've used that adjective to describe Crandall's work before, but some of "Unfaithful Wife" is simply gorgeous). And, hell, the story is a page-turner; you just know Alice is making a big mistake but, by golly, she can't help herself. The hilarity comes at the climax when Alice throws her hands up and resigns herself to the Stepford Wives life she was living before the fun interlude. How is it that she'll find love with the guy who bored her to tears just because Randy dumped her? I give the marriage another six months before Alice is making it with the milkman.

Pretty young school teacher Miss Whyte has noticed that one of her pupils, eighteen-year-old Lew Terson, has been making eyes and lewd gestures towards her during class. Then, one day after class, Lew spills the beans: he's mad about Miss Whyte and he knows she's reciprocal. The embarrassed English teacher spurns Lew's advances (while her thought balloons suggest she'd rather go down a different path - wink, wink) but the precocious teen is tenacious and makes his gorgeous teacher a deal: if she'll spend a night dancing and dining with him, he'll stop leering at and drooling over her in class. Admitting to herself that it's been years since she went out and had a good time, Miss Whyte agrees to the young hunk's terms and they go out on the date of a lifetime. Lew dresses like a businessman and sweeps the older woman off her feet. From there, it's only a hop, skip, and a hump to the hotel room, where Lew downs a bit of whiskey and grows horns and a tail.

Suddenly, Miss Whyte isn't so sure she wants to see what's behind that lettered shirt Lew is wearing, and heads for the door. Lew backhands Miss Whyte, throws her on the bed, and has his way with her. Two days later, stinking of raw sex and whiskey, Miss Whyte sneaks out the back door of the hotel and returns to school, only to find some obscene scribbling on the blackboard and notes placed around the classroom. Disgraced, Miss Whyte races home, but home is no sanctuary as, later that day, Mr. Jessup, the principal, arrives to tell the weeping teacher that not only has she lost her job, but the PTA is fixing to run her out of town. With nothing else to do, Miss Whyte moves to another town and starts another life but, she sighs, it'll be a cold day in hell before she trusts another man.

Poor Miss Whyte finds herself in pretty much the same dilemma as Kitty, the femme fatale of "I Can Never Marry," a woman without a town, sneaking out on the first train and trying to live down a sin that housewives and mothers find hard to forget. As entertaining as this tawdry tale is, you can't deny the misogyny present in these Confessions stories; women are used and thrown away, then punished for their "sins," denied a happy ending in most cases. I know that's the nature of this beast, as most of the readers (I'd love to see the demographics for this title... who was the intended audience?) want to read about characters who have it worse off than themselves. For once, I have no objections to Jack Kamen's art, which certainly comes off better in black-and-white than in the color titles.

"I Destroyed My Marriage"

When Louise's husband, Tod, tells her he'll be bringing his mother to live with them rather than finding her a "home," Louise begins a campaign of terror to ensure that her husband will regret the decision. She tells her two children to watch Nana around the baby because Gramma loves to eat children, especially fat little babies. Then she deliberately cuts her own finger and tells her mother-in-law to put the medicine bottle away in the cabinet, only to rush in later and place the bottle within reach of the children. The ensuing hysteria leads to Tod having second thoughts about Mum's stay but, to add a cherry on the top, Louise waits until the old lady falls asleep with her burning cigarette in an ashtray. The devilish woman sets fire to nearby magazines and then calls for her hubby in the backyard. Posed with a pot of water to douse the flames, Louise is startled to see Tod standing in the doorway. "I'm here... Louise... I saw... everything!" Tod sets his wife down with two choices: divorce or committing herself to an asylum for mentally deranged housewives. Louise begrudgingly chooses the latter but looks on the bright side: the mental institution must become her since, with the help of Joe Orlando, Louise makes a transformation from dowdy housewife to Marilyn Monroe!

Now here's a great Confessions story just itching for the Tales from the Crypt pay-off. Louise subjects her poor, innocent mother-in-law to such inhumane treatment that we can't wait for Mom to bury a conveniently-placed hatchet in her devilish daughter-in-law's head and serve her to the monstrous children as a cake! I was literally getting angry reading "I Destroyed My Marriage," because Tod's mom seems like a loving, caring individual, until that reveal, with Tod seeing the truth laid out before his eyes, brought a huge smile to my face. "See that, you silly cow?," I screamed at the page that dared not answer me back. I've thought of writing a Confessions-style yarn called "I Got Sucked Into These Mindless Fantasies That Taste So Good But Aren't Good For You!," but where's the market these days?

"Man-Crazy"

Let's not beat around the bush... Terry was "Man-Crazy"! Even though she's engaged to Vince, Terry ignores her mother's pleas to stay home and watch TV and hits the town for some action, in whatever form it might take. She's young, she's full of energy, she's got great breasts, and she knows how to use them. "Why let all this vigor go to waste?," she asks. So out she goes that night and the first ten guys who hit on her just aren't right. Nothing seems to click for her until a longshoreman sidles up to her and lets her feel his huge... shoulders. Terry is sold! They go out for a meal but the big hunk is strangely silent, almost maudlin. Later, they go for a stroll in the park, and the picture suddenly becomes crystal clear to Terry; in fact, she can see it reflected in her date's switchblade. Later, after it was over... newspapermen snap her picture as she lays unconscious in the park, longshoreman handcuffed to beat cop, and her face is spread all over the morning news: "Maniac Finally Caught With His Latest Victim!" Good news is that Vince doesn't care that she's damaged goods and marries her anyway. At last, a happy ending! But it happens to the one dame this issue who doesn't deserve it! The highlight of "Man-Crazy" is the gorgeous pencils of Johnny Craig, who gives the entire affair the proper noir touch. -Peter

Jack-Once again, Craig's art goes back and forth between his new, artistic, Picto-Fiction style and his old, dynamic, comic book style. I prefer the older Craig style, though I admit he does great work either way. As I read "Man-Crazy," I was thinking about how it would've ended much differently in a horror comic, with the tease carved up and left in the park. Instead, we get another sappy, happy ending. I thought the happy ending ruined "I Sold My Baby," which was otherwise curiously engrossing. I agree with you that Crandall's art on "Unfaithful Wife" is stunning, and reading this story made me realize that these are essentially cautionary tales for female readers. "They Ran Me Out of Town" is the second Kamen-illustrated story in the issue, and in both he seems to be doing better work than we've seen from him in some time. I did not like "I Destroyed My Marriage" as much as you did, though I'll admit that even Joe Orlando's art looks better than usual; there are still some wonky panels, so we can't have everything. What is wrong with us that we're enjoying this title so much?

Next Week...
Niño and Alcala make
Weird War Tales readable again!

And in Two Weeks...
The boys will wrap up their exhaustive
and exhausting coverage of EC Comics!